SOURCE: "Love Is a Federal Highway." in New York Times, November 5, 1989, Sec. 7, p. 31.

In the following review, Levin finds Wallace's collection of short stories evidence of both an impressive talent and a tendency toward excess.

With this collection of stories [Girl with Curious Hair], David Foster Wallace, the author of the novel The Broom of the System, proves himself a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent, one unafraid to tackle subjects large and small. Ever willing to experiment, he lays his artistic self on the line with his incendiary use of language, at times seeming to rip both the mundane and the unusual from their moorings, then setting them down anew, freshly described.

Mr. Wallace is particularly interested in flux as a partial definition of human nature, in distance as a component of love and—most important to him, perhaps—in the obvious as well as the subtle linking...